It’s As Official As The Geeks Will Allow…Voyager 1 Has Exited Our Solar System

Thirty-six years after it was launched from Earth on a tour of the outer planets, the plutonium-powered probe is more than 11 ½ billion miles from the sun, cruising through the vast, cold emptiness between the stars, the space agency said.

Voyager 1 actually arrived there more than a year ago, according to NASA. But it’s not as if there’s a dotted boundary line out there or a signpost, and it was not until recently that the space agency had the evidence to convince it of what an outside research team had claimed last month: that the spacecraft had finally plowed through the hot plasma bubble surrounding the planets and escaped the sun’s influence.

CNN has some interesting graphics, if you can stand the talking heads.